Equivalent shear wave velocity is one of the important parameters to determine the site category and further calculate the ground motion response spectrum. So detailed discuss the reliability of different equivalent methods has great meaning. After adjust the order of shear wave velocities of typical artificial sites and 274 actual engineering sites, we discussed the sensitivity of the travel time equivalent shear wave velocity (vse) and the period equivalent shear wave velocity (vsT) at different soil layer, respectively; and then compared their uniformity on site category with more than 200 sites. Scaling the shear wave velocities of each site model until vse reached the threshold values of site category, and calculated the vsT of that site. The results show that, vsT varied but vse keep steady when soil layer construction changed, it is mean vsT is a more sensitive parameter to reflect the influence of soil layer construction on ground motion parameters. The site classification results of two methods have high consistency when application to the actual engineering sites, so it is reasonable and effective to adopt vsT as the site classification index. The result of vsT is larger than vse, vsT shows normal distribution when vse reaches threshold values, so we can get their conversion value statistically.